"Counting Crimes" [Pokémon BW2] – Colress Remix

Описание: a cappella gen 5 trip hop? it’s more likely than you think.

This remix was completed very slowly, with lyrics first scrawled in July or August last year, recording done mostly around November-December, and mixing finished in March 2024. Musically, it’s inspired by Felix Riebl’s work on Spinifex Gum with Gondwana Choirs—I was fortunate enough to be there for the premiere of the song cycle, and it’s stuck with me for almost a decade now. That said, I ended up veering into Björk-y territory, and ripped off NIN’s harmonic lexicon. I’m a choir kid to the bone, but I love electronic music, so combining those elements of artificiality and humanity into indulgent a cappella trip hop has been incredibly fun.

This is a song about insomnia, so I’ll state my plaint here: I fall asleep no earlier than 1am, and at least once a week, I’ll wake up either drenched in sweat (sometimes with a racing heart to boot) or whirling through vertiginous sleep paralysis. I’ll dream about my morning routine, then find that when I wake up, everything feels foggier than it did when I was awake. I wrote this song while groggy and tired on the bus to uni, and more recently fell asleep on said bus. The very idea of counting crimes is a reference to Colress’ musical countdown, but it’s also a name I’ve given to something I tend to do late at night: that is, stare at the ceiling, and relive everything idiotic and insipid I’ve said to people I ostensibly care about. It’s a vicious cycle: Ruminate, lose sleep, lash out, and ruminate anew. When you regularly count crimes at night, you tend to wake groggy, and every quotidian interaction feels hazy, unreal. Combine this with social ineptitude, and we get a lovely result where I end up feeling like I’m perpetually on stage, poorly playing the role of ‘normal human’. (It’s a lonely performance, and the curtain never falls.) As such, the lyrics are about feeling inhuman and henceforth less than. …At the end of the day, I guess, it’s just a melodramatic song about autism, with all its black-and-white thinking, moral perfectionism, and melancholy.

Part of what I love about Pokémon BW/2 is that N’s arc is largely about his reconciliation with his own humanity—he’s learning, over the course of endless setbacks, that despite himself, he’s completely human, and wholly alive. He and Colress both stand at the outskirts of society, looking in, and conclude that while forging bonds takes work, it’s the key to strength of all kinds. I don’t think I’m the first person to take heart in how N and Colress find fulfilment in discovery and curiosity. BW/2 are games about growing up, and, in the process, coming to grips with being human. While this remix looks at the worst of that process, I still think there’s hope to be found in BW/2’s optimism.

There’s not much else to say. Uh, I pitch-corrected the alto 2 part, since there’s no way I can stay in tune that long around an E3-G3. Thank you to Simon Reid and Don Bate for lending me microphones and studio time, and to Alter Loy for his generous and detailed feedback on the track!

FANART USED:

-cobaltswirl: https://cobaltswirl.tumblr.com/post/7...

-etherfall: https://www.tumblr.com/etherfall/7418... and https://etherfall.tumblr.com/post/741...

-ritoryb: https://ritoryb.tumblr.com/post/72903...

I do not own Colress’ original theme, nor any other track or trademark associated with Pokémon. However, this remix (c) me – please give me credit if you'd like to reuse it anywhere.

GEAR AND PROGRAMS USED: Røde NT2 microphone; Logic Pro X; Native Instruments Guitar Rig 6; MeldaProductions MAutoPitch and MSaturator; iZotope Ozone Imager and Ozone Elements 9; YMCK Magical 8Bit Plug2.